On testing for de se and de re construals across languages
Abstract
Putatively de se expressions such as shifted indexicals and logophoric pronouns have become an object of considerable interest among formal semanticists and philosophers of language over the past 20 years. Fieldwork on understudied languages such as Amharic, Zazaki, Nez Perce, Ewe and a number of sign languages has played a crucial role in this research, resulting in a large inventory of pronouns and anaphors that have been described as unambiguously de se. Yet the question of how to go about eliciting data from a native speaker consultant about whether some pronoun or anaphor is obligatorily read de se has seldom been explicitly discussed. In Pearson (2013, 2015) I argued that the claim that logophoric pronouns are unambiguously de se is incorrect, at least for the Niger-Congo language Ewe. In this paper, I discuss the methodological difficulties that arise with elicitation work in this domain and describe how I have approached them in my research. There are two main issues: (i) the unusual or implausible nature of the ‘mistaken identity’ scenarios that must be presented to the consultant and (ii) the tendency of mistaken identity scenarios to systematically induce a bias against the de re reading. The difficulty presented by the first issue has been overestimated, while the second one has to my knowledge not been discussed before. I propose that (ii) is related to a broader observation about truth value judgment tasks: when asked to give a truth value judgement for a sentence S relative to a scenario, linguistically naïve consultants’ judgments are likely to be conditioned by an assumption that every feature of that scenario is relevant. I argue that this tendency leads to a bias in favour of de se over de re construals and propose some strategies for overcoming the difficulty that this presents for diagnosing de re readings.
Authors
Pearson, HCollections
- Linguistics [250]
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